Bottles on the Border: The History and Bottles of the Soft Drink ...

Chapter 5a
Houck & Dieter and Related Companies
[Parts of this history were previously published in Password, the Journal of the El Paso County
Historical Society (see Lockhart 1997a).]
By the middle of the 1920s Empire Bottling Works was the largest and most successful of
the non-franchised El Paso bottlers, vending its products across the United States and even to
Puerto Rico and Mexico City. The company successfully competed with biggest and best in the
business, second only to Coca-Cola in product sales in El Paso. The firm’s inception in 1912
resulted from the merging of two older companies: Purity Bottling and Manufacturing Company
and Houck & Dieter. Lon Gardner founded Purity in 1906, but the firm of Houck & Dieter was
the first soda water manufacturer in the City of El Paso dating back to 1881. Empire Products
Corp., next to last in a series of Empire companies, was bought by the Grapette Bottling
Company in 1956 and existed under that management until 1969 (Figure 5-1).
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